The Deader the Better (11 page)

“Nobody knows for certain,” he said. “Most folks think he
caught the old man when he wasn’t rational and got him to sign the
papers. Old guy
was
eighty-two or so. Drank like a fish. Down
to Freddy’s Timbertopper every day at nine. Back home at six.
Regular as clockwork.” The sheriff shook his head. “I kept
telling myself that the first time he drove off the road or hit
something, I was going to have to tell him to either quit drinking or
quit driving. Kept my fingers crossed, I did.”

“Your point is?” from Rebecca.

He sighed. She sighed back at him. Bigger. I was hoping they’d
keep at it and maybe we could have a Bugs and Daffy moment. But it
wasn’t to be.

“My point…is that it didn’t take a genius fly fisherman to
figure out that if you showed up at old Ben’s place ’long about
six-thirty in the evening, you were very likely to find the old man
snockered. Most people figure that’s just what Springer did. And
I’m telling you, they didn’t like it one bit. That old man was
kind of a landmark around here. Like he was their link with the past
in some manner or another.”

I thought it over. J.D.’d said that he’d stopped in to see the
old guy all the time. He’d admitted to trying to wear him down.
What had he called it?
Winning through persistence
.

Maybe J.D.’s definition of persistence included catching the old
man at an unguarded moment, maybe even drunk, and taking advantage of
him. Hell, I’d only met him twice, and god knows, with those kind
of numbers, there’s no shortage of people who would do the same
thing in a heartbeat and called it good business.

“Anybody ask the old man about it?” I asked.

“He was packed up and gone before anyone had the opportunity.”

“Who did the autopsy?” Rebecca asked.

Hand chuckled as he slid the gate shut and locked it. “First
off, Miss—”

“Doctor,” she corrected him.

“Yes…Doctor…like I was saying…we don’t have a coroner or
anything like that. If and when we need that kind of work done, we
call the state police. Second…anyone who has seen that body isn’t
likely to have the slightest doubt about the cause of death, believe
you me.”

Apparently she didn’t. “Who prepared the body for burial?”
she asked.

“Dewitt Davis,” he said. “Davis Funeral Home up on Third.”

He eased over by the cop shop door and put his hand on the handle.

“Did he take any pictures of the body?” Rebecca asked.

“I believe he did,” the cop said.

I wasn’t sure whether I meant it or not, but I said, “Thanks,”
and turned to leave.

“Ah…listen,” he said. We waited. “You seem like nice
folks,” he started again. “A word to the wise.” I could smell
what was coming. “A great many people around here aren’t
altogether sorry about what happened to Mr. J.D. Springer. As a
matter of fact, the way most people around here see it, when it comes
to Mr. J.D. Springer…” He hesitated. “The way most of them see
it…the deader the better.” He waited for it to sink in and then
said, “So you be careful now.” With that, he turned the handle
and stepped from view.

ONE OF THE REASONS WHY REBECCA DUVALL AND I HAVEbeen friends for
thirty-five years is because we learned early on that our minds don’t
work the same way. I’m a batch processor. You send me out for a
goat, I’m coming back with a goddamn goat. No…I won’t get the
dry cleaning on the way home. This is a goat trip. Next, I’ll make
a dry cleaning trip. Rebecca is totally the other way. Interactive.
Everything is connected to everything else is connected to everything
else. What store we start out for has no effect on where we end up.
Whatever product we went there to get has little or no bearing on
what we walk out with. All plans are subject to change without
notice. You cope.

We were ensconced in a Naugahyde booth along the west wall of the
Chat and Chew Café. A pecky cedar palace half a mile east of the
police station on the opposite side of the highway. We’d perused
the lunch menu and ordered coffee. Halfway through our second cup of
brown water, she rolled her eyes up out of the cup. “What did you
make of the sheriff?” she asked.

“Not what I expected.”

She nodded. “Me neither.”

“Seemed too…too something for a small-town cop.”

“Urbane.”

“You check out that uniform?”

“Hand-tailored.”

“You think so?”

“Women know these things.”

“I don’t think he was used to uppity women.”

“Uppity?…
Moi
?” She took a sip, made a face and put
the cup on the table. “I’m worried about Claudia and the
children,” she said.

“J.D.’s parents probably picked them up,” I said. “Which
would also explain why the Blazer is still in the driveway.”

She had to admit this made sense. For my part, I didn’t believe
a word of it. As a matter of fact, I thought I knew just exactly
where Claudia and the kids were, but I couldn’t be sure and I
didn’t want to get Rebecca’s hopes up. So I downplayed it.

“I’ve got a plan,” she said.

“Let’s hear it.”

She spread her hands. “We’re here…right?”

I couldn’t find any loopholes in the statement, so I agreed.

“As long as we’re here, let’s do everything we can.” She
looked to me for agreement and got it. Hell, I make my living running
errands for people who know full well I can’t solve their problem.
They just want to feel like they’ve done everything possible. Makes
it easier to live with themselves later.

“I want to talk to the undertaker. By state law, he has to have
a set of pictures of the body. I want to see them.”

I blew out a lungful of air. “If J.D. was in that car—”

She held up a hand. “I just want to be sure,” she said. I said
I understood.

“I also want to find out about these eviction proceedings.”

Again, I agreed. Everything Claudia and the kids had was tied up
in that property. No way we could let anybody walk off with it
without a fight.

“You want me to do that?” I asked.

“You’re no good with bureaucrats,” she said. She had a
point. Sooner or later they’d say something about how they had a
policy against something or other or about how they just worked here
and weren’t actually responsible for shit and then I’d start to
get snotty and things would go down the toilet from there. “You
want to handle that, too?”

She nodded. “The assessor or the city attorney or whoever
handles things like evictions in a burg like this is probably in the
same building with whoever keeps the records. While I’m checking on
the eviction, I can see if what the sheriff said about J.D. getting
the property cheap is true.”

I liked the sound of that. I was uncomfortable with the
possibility that J.D. might have stepped over the line. Color me with
a cynical crayon, but if I’m forced to bet my body parts on the
likelihood of whether, out of the goodness of his heart, one man
chose to sell a piece of property at a fraction of its value or
whether it is more likely that the other man screwed him out of
it…well, damn…sort of asks which is more prevalent, generosity or
greed, doesn’t it?

“What do you want me to do?” I asked.

“What you do best,” she said with a grin. “Do what you
always do. Turn over some rocks. Make bad jokes at people. Be
obnoxious. Piss somebody off.”

It’s nice to be appreciated. “Meet back here when?”

The time was twelve-thirty. We agreed on two hours, give or take.
Two-thirty or three.

I READ A BOOK ONCE BY SOME SOCIOLOGIST
NAMEDOldenburg. He called it
The Great Good Place
. His point
was about bars, coffee shops, beauty parlors, health clubs…what he
called “third places,” those places between work and home that
allowed the unrelated to relate to each other. He believed these
places, rather than job and family, were the glue that held a
community together. I don’t know if that’s true, but I do know
that when you’re in a shitburg town like this and you want to find
out what’s going on, you head for the local watering hole.

I’d counted three, so I knew a little trial and error was going
to be involved. When you’re on foot, whether you like it or not,
life gets linear. First one I came to was Freddy’s Timbertopper
Tavern. Turned out to be the old man’s bar. The place you gravitate
to when you don’t hear well enough to talk around the jukebox, and
you don’t mind if the old woman comes with you, ’cause you no
longer do anything she’d object to. I pulled open the door to find
a room full of giveaway baseball caps advertising heavy equipment,
chain saws and the ever-present John Deere tractor. I ducked back
outside and kept walking.

Downtown Stevens Falls was decked out in its holiday finery, the
hanging flower baskets replaced by Santas and reindeer and holly and
mistletoe. Light posts were wound with red ribbon to simulate candy
canes. Colored lights in the store windows. As I moved from store to
store, I tried to work up a little holiday cheer, but I couldn’t
push that burned-out car from my mind. Some perverse instinct kept
asking me to imagine what J.D.’s last moments must have been like.
The loudspeakers were having a “Holly Jolly Christmas.” I hummed
along, but my heart wasn’t in it. Smack in the middle of town was
the Stevens Falls Bar and Grille. Yeah, with an
e
at the end.
Dead giveaway. A quick peek in the door confirmed my suspicion that
the place had been urban-renewed. The butcher paper and the jars of
crayons on the tables said it all. No…this wasn’t the place,
either.

The bartender told me the Steelhead Tavern was the last building
inside the town limits. Took me the better part of fifteen minutes to
walk it from downtown. What they didn’t tell me was that the
next-to-last building in town was a small white church with a round
steeple that looked a whole lot more like a grain silo than a finger
pointing to heaven. The sign out front read, CLOSED.

I trudged along the shoulder, traffic whizzing by, my sneakers
crunching around in the gravel, contemplating whether or not a church
could rightly be closed. The more I thought about it, the more
sacrilegious it seemed. Even if it was true, they should have thought
of a better way to phrase it. Maybe something like MOVED ON TO A
BETTERPLACE or something like that, but not CLOSED. Right away, I
knew the Steelhead Tavern was the joint I’d been looking for. Set
down below the road, it was a squat rectangle made of a little river
rock and a lot of mortar, with a rusted corrugated metal roof thrown
over the top. Beer signs blinking in every window. Three acres of
muddy parking lot, half full at one-twenty-five in the afternoon. The
National Beater Pickup Finals. Seldom, if ever, have I seen such an
assemblage of dusty, dented, tailpipe-draggin’,
chickenwing-box-for-a-window pickup trucks collected in one place.
None of that Jap crap neither. No. These old boys bought strictly
American. About every third generation, whether they needed a new rig
or not.

I stood to the right of the doorway and waited for my eyes to
adjust. On the jukebox, Travis Tritt was offering somebody a quarter,
suggesting they use it to call somebody who cared. I heard the crack
of pool balls and then the sound of a ball hitting the floor. Whoops
and laughter, pinball machine bells and the drone of conversation.

I was at the short end of a big L-shaped bar. All the way at the
back, the kitchen and a five-door cooler. The wall behind the bar was
dedicated to pull tabs…the 1K plan of the terminally unemployed.
Taped up high, bright iridescent scorecards with winning stickers
pasted here and there. Down below, fifteen bright plastic bins
overflowed with tabs. Thirtysix-inch TVs in every corner. A Pepsi can
clock. A low wall divided the bar area from the rest of the place. On
this side, six two-person tables were squeezed against the wall. Then
two stairs down into the big part of the place. A ten-by-twenty stage
occupied the center of the far wall. Restrooms on either side. Ladies
and Gents. Four pool tables, three pinball machines, an old-fashioned
shuffleboard setup and about a dozen tables filled the remaining
space. One waitress with big hair was moving from table to table at
light speed.

The jukebox changed its tune. None of that nouveau country shit
here, no sir…’round here they played the real deal. Merle Haggard
tellin’ the big city to cut him loose and set him free…somewhere
in the middle of Montana. As I started down the bar, Merle was
tellin’ ’em just what they could do with their welfare and their
so-called Social Security. A third of the way down I found an empty
stool and squeezed myself in between an old woman in a bad wig and a
skinny kid who was talking to his buddy and had his back to me.

“He’s right, you know,” the woman said. She was somewhere
between sixty and eighty, with a face like a satchel and an auburn
wig she wore on the top of her head like a hat.

“Who’s right?” I asked.

“Why, Merle Haggard…that’s who.” She waved her cigarette
at the bartender. “Ain’t gonna be no damn Social Security.”

“Yes ma’am,” I said.

This seemed to satisfy her. She went back to chewing her gums and
smoking.

The bartender poured her a fresh shot of Canadian Club with a
water back.

“What can I get ya?” he asked me.

He was my vision of the perfect WWII sergeant. Square face, thick
neck, flattop haircut and an expression that said nothing you ran by
him was going to be new.

“What have you got on tap?”

“Bud, Bud Lite, Rainier, Rainier Light.” He expected me to
demand some sissy microbrew. I fooled him. I ordered a Bud and a
cheeseburger.

“Up for the season?” he asked. Around here, that meant“deer”
season.

“No,” I said. “I came up to see a friend of mine. Turned out
he was dead.” Nothing like a little death and mayhem to spice up a
conversation. Like I figured, it wasn’t possible to walk away from
a lead-in like that.